In the lead-up to the military operation it recently launched in tandem with Israel, the United States had blown hot and cold towards Iran. On one hand, the Trump administration had deployed an imposing naval and air armada to the Gulf and its regional bases, which many observers saw as the prelude to a large-scale attack, whose scale and duration were impossible to predict. On the other hand, Washington had agreed to resume negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programme. Behind this strategic question lay an attempt to resolve the broader political dispute that has pitted Iran against the US since the 1979 hostage crisis.

While it is difficult to foresee what the consequences of the joint military operation will be, particularly regarding the survival of the Iranian regime, a possibly long and difficult period of normalisation of relations between Iran and the US would amount to a new revolution for Iranians, as it would undermine the ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic.

Islamic Republic’s collapse predicted

The 1979 revolution marked the arrival of popular Islam as a political force. Since then, the Islamic Republic has mainly been viewed through the lens of revolutionary Islam, and its imminent collapse has been repeatedly predicted; meanwhile the forces of independence and its political ideas, freedom and respect for human rights and social justice, which overthrew a despotic monarchy subordinate to the US, have been sidelined. But these forces never disappeared, even as the regime descended into despotism and corruption, and society continued to change, and often rebel.

This unstable balance is now coming to an end. The massacres of January 2026 constitute a point of rupture that may prove fatal for the Islamic Republic. The regime is in the midst of an existential crisis that highlights its inability to govern. It amounts to ideological suicide, because Iran is now compelled to negotiate a deal (…)

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